There are a wide variety of electrical connectors available which are adapted for mounting on a printed circuit board. The connectors have electrical contacts for terminating with appropriate conductors and for either surface mounting or solder tail mounting to the circuit traces on the printed circuit board.
With such electrical connectors, it is desirable to be able to gang-load the connectors with multiple contacts, such as contact strips wherein a plurality of contacts are joined by an integral carrier web. With ever-increasing miniaturization of electronic circuitry, it has become increasingly difficult to gang-load multiple contacts because of the spacing of the insertion holes in the printed circuit board. More particularly, the insertion holes often are arranged in rows through the printed circuit board. The closeness of the holes is limited because of the possibility of solder bridging between adjacent holes and shorting out the circuit. Consequently, it has become common to arrange rows of insertion holes in a staggered configuration. In other words, the holes of adjacent rows are not in a line but are alternatingly staggered along the line in transverse alignment.
These measures which are taken to prevent solder bridging and allow increased density on the printed circuit board create problems in connector design, particularly when it is desirable or necessary to gang-load multiple contacts. In other words, it can be understood that the contacts on a flat carrier strip are in a straight line whereas the insertion holes in the printed circuit board are staggered. One solution to this problem has been to mount contacts longitudinally in a connector housing, with the contacts in alternating transverse orientation so that their solder tails are alternatingly transversely spaced for insertion into the staggered printed circuit board holes. This requires specially designed tooling, multiple assembly steps or two different configurations of contacts, all of which is undesirable and costly. Another approach has been to stamp contacts out of flat sheet metal with each contact having two solder tails, one of which can be removed so that a selected solder tail can be inserted through the staggered holes in either of two rows of insertion holes in the printed circuit board. However, flat contacts do not serve the wider purposes of stamped and formed contacts, such as contacts which lock or retain the conductors, commonly termed "wire traps".
This invention is directed to solving the myriad of problems discussed above by providing a multi-conductor electrical connector which is capable of gang-loading a plurality of contacts and which is capable of termination in staggered holes in a printed circuit board.